This invention relates to a bill accepting device used in a vending machine, exchanger or the like device.
A bill accepting device comprises at least a bill discrimination unit performing a function of discriminating whether a deposited bill is a true bill or a counterfeit one and accepting the true bill and returning the counterfeit one and a receiving unit for receiving the accepted bill. For enabling a once accepted bill to be returned if required, the receiving unit must be constituted of an escrow unit which temporarily retains the bill and, in this case, a stocker unit which stores bills overflowing the escrow unit must be additionally provided. A prior art bill accepting device of this type is disclosed in the specification of Japanese Patent Preliminary Publication No. 182295/1982. This prior art device is so constructed that one bill which has just been accepted is temporarily retained in an escrow unit and this bill retained in the escrow unit is stored in a stocker when vending has been made. In this prior art device, each bill insertion and vending operation must be accompanied by two steps of operations, i.e., operation for pulling the bill into the escrow unit and the operation for transferring the bill from the escrow unit to the stocker with a result that a long operation time is required.
It is an object of the present invention to provide a novel bill accepting device which has eliminated the above described disadvantage of the prior art device.
In the bill accepting device of the type as was disclosed in the above mentioned Japanese Patent Preliminary Publication No. 182295/1982, a bill is normally not retained in the escrow device so that collection of bills can be effected by collecting only bills accumulated in the stocker. Accordingly, an inventory operation has not been considered in the prior art bill accepting device. In the bill accepting device to be proposed in the present invention, however, there is provided a bill passage switching section which causes a bill passage of the bill discrimination section to communicate selectively either with the escrow section or with the stocker section so that the number of bills which can be retained in the escrow section can be increased to some extent. Then a question arises as to how to collect bills retained in the escrow section when bills are collected from a vending machine or exchanger.
It is, therefore, another object of the invention to provide, in the novel bill accepting device proposed by the present invention, an inventory device capable of effectively collecting bills which have already been retained in the escrow device.
In the bill stocker device, it is very important for management of vending machines to know a state of accumulation of bills. For knowing such state of accumulation, conceivable methods include detection of reaching of an amount of accumulation to a predetermined upper limit or performing counting upon accumulation of each bill. It is still another object of the invention to provide a signal generation device usable for both of the detection of the upper limit of accumulation and detection of the number of the accumulated bill one by one.
It is another object of the invention to provide a bill accumulation device capable of effectively storing a large number of bills.